1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to servers, for example personal computer servers, and more particularly to a system and method for verifying protocol conformance of servers, for example, to Client/Server protocol compliance.
2. Description of the Related Art
The rapid increase in popularity of the World Wide Web (WWW or web) has created a need for a set of standards, commonly defined in Request For Comments (RFC) documents. These documents describe communication protocols for web-based applications, such as electronic mail, file transfer, mail transfer, network management and many others things.
Web-based applications operate in a Client and Server model, where the client will communicate with the server based on the defined standards, for example, the IMAP4 (Internet Massaging Access Protocol). E-mail Client and Server communicate according to the protocol defined in RFC2060, and the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) Client and Server communicate according to the protocol defined in RFC821.
Specifications in an RFC document define rules of the base protocol, and provide for certain requirements and freedom from the rules. The requirements state rules that must be followed, whereas a less restricted rule should be followed but there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a particular aspect of such a rule, or perhaps the entire rule may be optional. Consequently, each implementation of protocol can differ from each other, resulting in interoperability issues between implementations.
Once a protocol is widely used by the Internet community, the need for improvements and enhancements results in extensions to the base protocol, and therefore the existing implementations of the protocol may choose to integrate some or all of the extensions while retaining interoperability requirements.
The conventional approaches to ensuring conformance and interoperability of an implementation include:
1. Testing with real clients requires that a user interact manually with the clients, and requires that the testers obtain a wide variety of clients to test with. This restricts what can be tested to those functions that are used by those specific clients, or PA1 2. Telnet, which allows specific protocol sequences to be tested, but which requires manual work (typing commands and checking the responses by hand), or PA1 3. A developer may have a custom, protocol-specific program that performs some level of automated testing.
Once the conformance and the interoperability issues are resolved, the server implementation faces an entirely different set of issues, such as durability and scalability. The conventional approach disadvantageously includes a test lab that employs many resources (humans, machines and software) to accomplish durability and scalability tests.
Therefore, a need exists for a generic test engine to automate the process of conformance, interoperability, durability and scalability of servers. A further need exists for a system and method for protocol-specific tests and expected test results which are described and executed with no need for human intervention nor customized software.